D-Day

This essay D-Day has a total of 3401 words and 11 pages.
D-Day

D-Day, June 6 1944. Air-Power: Significant or not? A private who was aboard one of the first few gliders to reach Normandy expresses his feeling: "I experienced an interesting psychological change in the few minutes before and immediately after take off. As I had climbed aboard and strapped myself into my seat I felt tense, strange and extremely nervous. It was as if I was in a fantasy dream world and thought that at any moment I would wake up from this unreality and find that I was back in the barrack room at Bulford Camp. Whilst we laughed and sang to raise our spirits - and perhaps to show others that we were no scared - personally I knew that I was frightened to death. The very idea of carrying out a night-time airborne landing of such a small force into the midst of the German army seemed to me to be little more than a suicide mission. Yet at the moment that the glider parted company with the ground I experienced an inexplicable change. The feeling of terror vanished and was replaced by exhilaration. I felt literally on top of the world. I remember thinking, 'you've had it chum, its no good worrying anymore - the die has been cast and what is to be, will be, and there is nothing you can do about it.' I sat back and enjoyed my first trip to Europe." Yet another rifleman who was carried to the beach in the LCVP?s relates one of his incidents: "I got on the gun. I set the gun up, and we?re looking, we?re looking. He says, "See if you can spot him." All of a sudden I spotted him, about 200 yards away, and I?d say maybe 30 or 40 feet higher than me. He wasn?t firing at me. He was firing down across. So when he opened up again ? the Germans, when they fire, they fire fast, they don?t fire like we did, because they change the barrels of their machine guns in seconds. Ours were a pain. We had to take the whole gun apart and screw the barrel off, and then put another barrel on. They would get hot if you fired like the Germans. We only fired bursts of three or four at a time. The Germans put their finger down, they?d run a hundred off. Because they just push a button, the barrel falls out, and they put another one on. We couldn?t do that. We had to take the whole gun down, screw the barrel off, put a new barrel on, then loosen it three clicks, it was a pain. So he fired, I picked him up, I got about ten rounds in there, that sonofagun never fired any more. Some of the riflemen got up and they walked over and looked in the hole. They didn?t signal that there was anybody in there. They just looked in the hole and walked away..." Background of D-Day: The Second World War had started almost five years ear, on September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. England and France had promised to defend Poland. But they were unprepared to fight, and as a result they were terribly beaten. by the next spring, France had fallen into German hands. The British army had to flee the Continent and escaped from the French port of Dunkirk with frightful losses. In the summer of 1940 the Germans, with their allies, the Italians, controlled all of western Europe. The German air force began its attempt to bomb the British Isles into rubble. Nevertheless, the British began to think about getting back onto the continent. They started planning an attack across the Channel- even though it seemed more likely that they would become the invaded rather than the invaders. Hitler threatened to invade England. He went so far as to assemble a fleet of barges along the French coast, planning to use them as assault boats. But he hesitated because he realized the risks of an amphibious attack. Also, he knew that the British navy would destroy itself, if necessary in an attempt to smash a German invasion fleet. Still the idea was tempting. The British knew as well as Hitler did that if the Germans could make the landing successfully, England would be lost. Meanwhile, Royal Air Force fighter pilots in their

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